


Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

by wishwellingtons



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Malcolm wins, caledonian mafia, pre-Series 4, repost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:24:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set pre-Season 4. </p><p>Ten hours in the life of Malcolm Tucker. When James Murray has a drugs misdemeanour weeks before a leadership battle, Malcolm has an epic cleanup on his hands. Jamie Macdonald sees it through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Strange Bedfellows

Malcolm's phone rings in the middle of the night. His first, groggy, irrelevant thought is, _Jamie_. Fortunately, this is impossible, because Jamie is lying beside Malcolm, on his stomach and very recently asleep, but already (as Malcolm, eyes still shut, reaches for his Blackberry) beginning to kick up one hell of a fuss.  
  
Swearing and scuffling and making the exaggerated, sleep-drunk faces that come with waking Jamie before dawn and without coffee, the younger man keeps up a litany of complaint long after he's shoved himself into the crook of Malcolm's arm, dumping the weight of his body along Malcolm's left-hand-side and grumbling quietly.  
  
Malcolm puts an arm round him without even looking at him, and Jamie continues his drowsy abuse with one scratchy cheek on Malcolm's chest. Malcolm still hasn't opened his eyes, but he times his listening and speaking to press his lips to Jamie's hair. He's distracted, obviously, but that's the only time he really shows affection.  
  
"Fucking _wanker_ _s_ ," Jamie is muttering, although Malcolm knows that when the stuttering nancy on the other end mans up enough to keep his job and give Malcolm a proper fucking _explanation_ , Jamie's psychotic devotion to his work will propel him through orbit into alerteness, instant efficiency and rage.   
  
Olly really is taking a long time to remember where the fuck his testes are (Jamie and Malcolm are much preoccupied with the other men's bollocks. They think Cal Richards are still in the plastic wrapping, and that Geoff Holnhurst's match his tiny head).   
  
Jamie grunts and goes quiet. As ever, the younger man's body radiates heat; he's a kind of hyperactive furnace whether awake or asleep. Older and colder, Malcolm is grateful for this, if not for the miscellaneous kicks, grunts and football-related mutterings that fly his way during the night.   
  
A couple of times he's forcibly shoved Jamie from the bed. This was received badly but, oddly enough, far better than the one, subsequent occasion on which Malcolm snatched up his duvet and went to sleep (i.e., drowsed in the glow of News 24) in the study. That was, temporarily, so very disastrous for their association (by which Malcolm means, 'the political stability of Great Britain' and not the process whereby Jamie has become his 5-a-side ally, Valerian root pedlar and the man in his bed) that he hasn't repeated the experiment. He's still not sure why Jamie resented it so much.  
  
The long and the short of it is that it's easiest to relate to Jamie in the early morning, through a very comfortable fog of political crisis. Jamie is grumbling thickly and starting, christ, to slide down Malcolm's chest, still ostensibly half-asleep and with a begrudging air as if he resents the whole thing. Malcolm's first real moment of alertness comes with the tantalising hypothesis that this might be a return to their weeks of Competitive Blowjobs, seen by Jamie as the only way to live through the "fucking boring" summer recess, and which had nearly killed Malcolm on five separate occasions.   
  
It's a promising thought and, after tensing when Jamie's head finally slips beneath the duvet, Malcolm lies back, and sighs.  
  
A second later, he's sitting bolt upright in bed, and for all the wrong reasons.  
  
"James Murray's done WHAT?"  
  
The abuse from beneath the duvet is muffled, wordless, and instantaneous.   
  
"Call me back in five seconds, cunt," Malcolm snaps at Olly, who is on the other end and hopefully deaf to surround-sound, and hangs up. Malcolm lifts the duvet, angrily, taking in much of Jamie's scruff, for good measure. "Either shut your mouth or put my cock back in it."  
  
Jamie's face is purple with rage. "I fucking nutted myself on your fucking hipbone! Why can't you fucking eat? Jesus, do you ever put _anything_ in your mouth?"  
  
"Quiet. Set me a good example," Malcolm purrs, and drops the duvet again. Olly rings back just then, and the voice is gone. "Listen, popbitch, when I tell you to call me back in five seconds, I'm not asking you to go and have a wank into your college scarf, okay? Jesus. How much of a cock-up have you made this time?"  
  
Malcolm maintains his concentration remarkably well during the conversation that follows. Jamie is most aggrieved by this, especially when - after ending the call by ordering Olly to speak to no-one and go fuck himself up the arse with a stapler - Malcolm pulls back the covers and abruptly gets out of bed.   
  
"What the fuck? What the fucking _fuck_?"   
  
Jamie scrambles up and, naked, follows Malcolm towards the bathroom. His face is scarlet. Malcolm has found a dressing gown, but he discards it again quickly, wrenching the shower on and getting inside.  
  
Jamie looks like he's about to reenact the most famous parts of _Psycho_.  
  
"Did I just break my fucking skull on your withered bones so that fucking _barn conversion_ prep-boy _jessie_ could shit in your ear because he can't find the fucking _raffia_ again?"  
  
Soap and water already halfway through his eyes, Malcolm gives him a look of weary distaste. Whenever Jamie's really pushing for an argument, he's dimly aware that Malcolm's response - beneath the snarling vowels, mixed metaphors1 and venom - often includes a kind of quiet dislike. This makes nothing any easier.  
  
"Nicola Murray's husband has just fallen out of a club in Soho with a glamour model in one hand and a fucking postal sack of coke in the other."   
  
He flicks his gaze over Jamie, who is slightly hard, and starts washing.   
  
Jamie's response is an elaborately-mimed epiphany on a scale usually associated with Glaswegian drunks and opera cuckolds. Malcolm has shut the door, but Jamie swings it open again.   
  
"Oh, I fucking see. I fucking see. Nicola fucking Murray's bawling her eyes out, so obviously _you_ have to be there to check if her tits show through her t-shirt yet."   
  
"The next Home Secretary's husband - Foetusgate? Have you forgotten? Prime Minister's black girlfriend crying over dead kid, imminent fucking leadership contest - oh, yeah, very mature - anyway, James fucking Murray is snorting Columbia's finest with some girl who will _inevitably_ turn out to be a prozzie and the only reason I'm not already down there is because I can't turn up covered in fucking _jizz_. _Your_ jizz."   
  
Malcolm stops: from the bedroom comes a sound he'd recognise over sirens, thunderstorms and beneath the sound of ocean spray. A running shower and Jamie's fury are just white noise. His _Blackberry._  
  
"Fucking _get that_ , would you?"  
  
"I'll fucking chin you, is -- " Malcolm sweeps past him, leaving the water running, grabs the phone and returns, rinsing off with his head well out of the spray.  
  
"She's what? Fuck. _White Power_?  Is _she_ involved? Where? Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ." Malcolm leans back against the tiles. Still completely dry in the bathroom, Jamie's staring at him as if he doesn't know whether to fuck Malcolm or cleave him limb from limb.   
  
"Who found out? Well, at least the little queer has his uses. All right. Pour a fucking bucket over his head, get - yeah, Frankie, lock her in a hotel room with Frankie, and warm up the phones. Is - " Malcolm swears, muffled, then abruptly changes tone as an entirely different speaker takes the line.  
  
"Nicola. Stop crying. Nicola. I'm on my way. He won't. C'mon." He exhales. It's Malcolm's patient face. And voice. "I know you must be very upset, but _did you talk to the press_? Hey, Nicola, Nicola. "  
  
"If you say her name again," says Jamie, softly, "I will drown you."  
  
"Oh, he's a piece of fucking shite, all right, and he will rue the fucking day. What? You're most upset about _what_?" Over the shower, Jamie can  just make out the sounds of tinny female distress. Suddenly Malcolm's face cracks into a smile. "The leadership contest? Ha. Fucking hell. I've created a fucking monster, haven't I? Have to say, Nicola, I'm honestly a little bit disgusted."2  
  
A wordless cry (not Malcolm's) ends the call. In the twenty seconds that follow, Jamie plunges into the shower stall, knocks everything off the little ledge, and attempts to drown Malcolm by the simple expedient of holding his head back under the water. Malcolm responds by clawing at Jamie's body until he found something squeezable, squeezing it, then pinning Jamie against the tiles and hurling abuse.   
  
"Do you _want_ the government of this country to be overrun by fucking blue-blooded chinless scarf-wearing shits?"  
  
"It already _is_ ," complains Jamie, trying to kick him. Malcolm snarls and pins him closer.  
  
"The fucking 'glamour model' James fucking Murray's may or may not have been giving it to --"  
  
"I thought you said it was fucking _coke_? Makes your dick shrink. Fuck - "  
  
" - I never had that problem, Christ are you hard _again_?" Malcolm shifts his hips a little. "Jesus wept, Jamie."  
  
"We're not all five hundred years old. Talk and fuck."   
  
With exaggerated distaste, Malcolm pulls away from him and reaches for the variant on coal tar that Jamie stores in Malcolm's bathroom3 and uses for shampoo. From its packaging, it's probably Soviet Union c. 1975, bulk-bought, hoarded and rationed by the crossest man in Motherwell. Malcolm has no idea why Jamie still has hair.   
  
He shoves the bottle into Jamie's hand and tells him to hurry the fuck up.   
  
 "What the hell is _wrong_ with you?"  
  
"James Murray's fucking _playmate_ has a dad in the BNP. And she was one of those Page 3 girls with the soundbites - you know - "  
  
"Keira from Barnsley thinks war is great and immigrants smell," prompts Jamie. "She'd also like to do it with her sister."  
  
"Exactly. One about Muslims in 2003. From before _The Sun_ had its swing to the _right_." Malcolm's sneer is momentarily echoed by Jamie, before Jamie remembers that he fucking hates Malcolm and consequently doesn't give a tiny tit whether everything's lovely in the garden or the entire Cabinet's just been found dead in gimp gear, suspended from the ceiling with an orange in each mouth.   
  
"And from what Glenn, in his fucking spluttering pussyish old maid manner was implying, it seems she's the kind of girl readers are likely to remember."  
  
"Big tits," Jamie suggests.  
  
"Very." Malcolm watches from beneath his eyelashes, preparing Jamie for a hell of indecision. "A lot of bouncers saw them. The club manager's been on the phone, it looks like things are getting ugly. We've only got a couple of hours."  
  
"Oh, _fuck_."  Jamie's eyes were full of anguish at the prospect before him.  
  
Trembling with the proffered bliss of beating club owners, hacks _and_ putative racists to a bloody pulp (that almost NEVER HAPPENED anymore) vs. the agony of capitulating to Malcolm and that cow who wanted his cock in her, Jamie could have wept with frustration.  
  
For Malcolm, making him look so stricken was (nearly) better than sex; and rarely, in all their years of fucking and politics, had he managed it in so few words.  
  
After a few more seconds, early training won. Jamie squared his shoulders, set his chin to 'government enforcer' and popped the shampoo cap. Malcolm gave him a smirk and went to leave the shower.  
  
"Not so fast." A hand grips4 his wrist. Jamie is offering his his most charming smile, the one which makes his eyes look light and extremely shallow.  
  
"You're forgetting something." It's a terrible fucking cliche, even for a Jolson fan, but Jamie's still grinning as he slides his hands up the back of Malcolm's neck, enjoying (as ever) the reptilian little shudder that Malcolm gives when Jamie does anything he likes.   
  
"If you think I'm gonna let Nicola crash and fucking burn while I jerk _you_ off," Malcolm scoffs, although his eyes are already hooded. "The car'll be here in five minutes."   
  
"This won't take long."  
  
Malcolm kisses him. "Don't I fucking know it."  
  
They're lauging, and it's almost lovely. Then Malcolm's _landline_ starts screaming, and Jamie's left to curse as the _bloodsucking fucking parasitic skeletal white bastard_ in question leaves him instantly to see who was ringing.  
  
\---  
  
1Jamie only mixes metaphors when low on sleep or wanting an orgasm. Something broken in Malcolm's head means he finds this attractive.  
  
2In Malcolm's world, that kind of purring insult is the equivalent of sex. Or possibly 'I love you', a phrase which Jamie (despite Cliff Lawton) has said to him only once, shortly before vomiting at the 2005 DoSaC Christmas party. Nobody else heard and even Malcolm pretended not to.  
  
3 For the record, Malcolm is not fucking okay with this. He can keep a toothbrush, because Malcolm hates morning breath, but anything more is way too fucking domestic for his liking. They're not fucking married. Besides, it smells like the USSR.  
  
4Malcolm occasionally worries about the implications of Jamie's strength, redolent as it is of monkeys and escaped lunatics. On the other hand, he gives fucking amazing handjobs.


	2. Happy Families

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terri was rather excited. It was years since she'd been in a "student house".

If anybody noticed that Malcolm and Jamie had arrived together,1 sprung from the same coffin and smelling of the same kind of transcendental rage, they were persuaded not to mention it by the blind white fury suffusing Malcolm's face.   
  
\---  
  
Halfway through the journey, Malcolm and Jamie had been effectively distracted from carving off each other's skin by the news that the press were outside Richmond Terrace. They'd been alerted to the occurrence of _something_ by a Whitehall mole whom Jamie instantly vowed to mount on the wall (especially if it were Julius Nicholson). Circling the wagons round either DoSaC or Downing Street was out of the question, since it would definitely give the press gimps the erroneous impression that that _something_ had happened.   
  
Since Nothing had happened, this was inadvisable.   
  
Between vowing each other's imminent destruction and the dissolution of all personal ties, Malcolm and Jamie (the former looking like death; he'd been on three hours sleep for weeks, which pissed Jamie off, but not as much as being pissed off by it pissed him off) had agreed that what they needed to achieve was a summary execution of James Murray, James Murray's prozzer girlfriend, whoever gave James Murray the coke, and all the Soho clubgoers who mistakenly believed they'd seen some, any combination of the above.2  
  
Circling the wagons at the Murrays' home was, equally, a fucking disastrous idea, since the media cumcloths would probably go there next. Noone had a clue where Glenn lived, and Malcolm said he wasn't spending the night in Zone fucking fifteen even for politics.2.5 Terri actually had a backbone.3 The obvious choice, since he was already awake and a fucking gutless wonder, was the home of Mr. Olly Reeder.  
  
"I still don't know why we had to do this _here_ ," was their host's greeting, as Malcolm (Armani, death-glare, cufflinks) and Jamie (psycho anorak, Trade Unionist grey shirt) walked in, volleying as many insults at his postcode, decor and legs as they could. Time was running short  
  
Terri, who looked dazed and blowsy and a bit like she'd been shagging (much to Glenn's embarassment)4 involuntarily backed a few inches away as Malcolm (eyes like vampire) and Jamie (hair still wet) passed her. Jamie saw this and instantly, passionately resented it.  
  
"Hey. Jo Brand. Glenn - Glenn's never been to Soho, I know that, and the little man in the red-and-yellow car here still hasn't been _weaned_ , but you're old enough and ugly enough to have a handle on these things."   
  
Olly, damp-haired and still in his dressing gown, was ducking anxiously arounds as he attempted to make tea for the nine hundred Scottish minions ("Christ, you fucking bedwetter, I bet your mum was still breastfeeding you at prep school," said Jamie, nearly in passing, ordering a black coffee in a proper fucking coffee cup) who seemed, already, to have set up camp in his living room.  
  
Identikit translucent men with allergies to the sun were unplugging things and laughing at his broadband. Frankie had even brought his collection of offensive cartoons, pinning them against the side of Olly's (nice, cream) sofa in order to replicate his cubicle. Like a nightmarish air raid warden, Malcolm meanwhile insisted all windows and curtains were shut, and offended Olly further, in response to a sarcastic question about whether Malcolm thought he should scan for bugs and terrorists, by explaining that Olly just wasn't important enough. As a feeble and ill-thought-out rejoinder to being told to fetch some more paper and phone chargers, Olly asked why they couldn't phone Sam, the _actual_ PA. Before that moment, Terri and Glenn had both credited Olly with a certain, basic intelligence. Now they knew he had none.  
  
"Disturb that wee girl in the middle of the night?" Jamie asked, two parts disbelief to three flashes of lightning-in-the-graveyard, giving Malcolm the necessary silence in which to move from narrow-eyed disgust to vampiric, visceral contempt.   
  
"Listen. It is not _Sam_ 's fucking fault your boss's human tumour of a husband chose tonight to play Adolf-and-Eva with half of Columbia up his septum, but I'll be fucked -- "  
  
" -- or rather," Jamie told Olly, " _you'll_ be --"  
  
" -- if I bring _my_ PA into this sorry pissup. She's a very well-brought-up girl. Christ, I'm not having her wandering round _here_ in the dark, she lives in _Hampstead_."   
  
"It's only Stockwell!"   
  
Several russet-headed vampires sniggered. Malcolm narrowed his eyes. "You seem very anxious to see her."  
  
Olly expressed frantic and fervent denial.  
  
Jamie, after a brief circuit of the Caledonian mafia (a glazed peace settling in his eyes, as if to say: _these are my people_ ), slapping heads and asking Frankie (receiving insolence) if he wanted his wife to find the fucking pictures, grabbed Glenn by the shoulder and took him towards the door.   
  
Predictably, Glenn made objections (relating mostly to the unhealthy hour, his Human Rights, and Kafka) but Jamie, after sharing an unreadable look with Malcolm, kept a fist in his shirtfront and dragged him to the car. Depositing him in the back seat and telling the driver to _fucking well wait_ , he stormed back up the steps and demanded A Word with Malcolm.   
  
The air was immediately several shades thicker with testosterone, and the efforts of people being casually, calmly, eye-poppingly silent.   
  
Gathering his coat around him like a mafia villain in winter, Malcolm lead him into the downstairs toilet, for privacy.  
  
The combined deathglares of six Glaswegian pressthugs prevented Olly from making the obvious joke.  
  
\---  
  
They were only six inches apart in the bathroom, which naturally made Jamie want him, but also made a low hiss very effective for what he was about to say.  
  
"Right. "Murray Time"." He moved a little closer. "If you so much as fucking _look_ at her, I'll come back, I'll cut off her head and I'll selotape it to your fucking _eyes_. Then, I'll cut off _your_ head and selotape it to the wall, and I'll fucking skullfuck the both of you until your brains run out down your necks. You insomniac shithead fucking _dick_."  
  
Malcolm appeared to accept these terms.   
  
As soon as the car departed, taking Jamie and Glenn (the latter making Romanian orphan eyes through the window) Malcolm Tucker visibly relaxed. Nobody else was quite brave enough to breathe.  
  
"Right. Dougal, re-route all calls to DoSaC and to my office, through that landline. Charlie, what does Hamish say about the press?"  
  
"Three or four o'the bastards, but they're no goan to print yet."  
  
"Good. Fraser?"  
  
"Out in the car with the bastard. Once he's shown him the girl, he and Johnnie're going through her bins."  
  
"Eachann?"  
  
This fourth Attendant Lord  gave a reply so thickly Ferguslie Park that, with the exception of Malcolm, it was understood by noone in the room. Fortunately, it seemed to please him.  
  
"Good. Now put the line out."  
  
Olly, returning to provide yet another Scotsman with yet another Bell's-in-black-coffee, turned. "Wait, what did he say?"  
  
Fraser spat. "It was in Gaelic, you fucking Nazi, and don't spill that, it's a cashmere scarf."  
  
"No, not that - wait, what, Malcolm employs guys in _cashmere_ now? How does that fit with the - anyway - I find that, Nazi, very offensive, personally  -- "  
  
"Whereas in Glasgow, 'Nazi' means 'Happy Birthday' and we love it," said Hamish, and everyone Scottish laughed. Olly went pink.  
  
"Actually, my ex-girlfriend was, was Jewish."  
  
"Which one? The one you dumped because Malcolm said to?"  
  
"No! ...Frankie, shut up. No but, what line? I don't know about a line."  
  
Malcolm surveyed the room"There's no truth in the rumour that Oliver Reeder, Junior Policy Advisor, was this morning photographed in Soho while in possession of cocaine. It's a simple case of mistaken identity, and if anyone demurs, I will make his cock look like a fucking cheese string."  
  
Olly dropped both the cups he was holding. For a second he didn't even notice. "Fuck! No, Malcolm, no, honestly, this is going too far."  
  
A gingerish man with bold freckles and an accent pure Keppochhill appeared at the bottom of Olly's stairs. "She's ready for you, Malc."  
  
Malcolm kept him waiting only for a moment, while he briefly indicated to Olly the consequences of a refusal.  
  
Olly, mourning his carpet and the death of his political ambitions, stepped aside and slumped onto a dining chair.  
  
"If you didn't want to be involved, Olly, you shouldn't have had us all round."  
  
The Scottish minions cheered as he left.  
  
***  
  
"He wasn't here."  
  
The club manager, bleary-eyed but as wary as the situation (chaotic closing, immediate arrival of Glaswegian psychopath with middle-aged accomplice) demanded, set his jaw.  
  
"That's what I'm saying, _he_ wasn't here.'  
  
"And that's what _I'm_ saying, _I_ wasn't h -- "  
  
Jamie had to think fast. "Listen, you fat _fuck_!" he seethed, holding Glenn by the collar, neckfat and _chin_ as large drops of venomous Scottish spit sprayed upwards onto the older man's face. "Do you _want_ to destroy your family now? Do you have any fucking idea what my sister has been through? If you shit this up for me now, I will _fuck_ you, you fucking rectal Nutter _growth_. Do you hear me? You're anal fucking seepage. Do you want to give your mother-in-law another stroke? I knew she should never have fucking married you."  
  
He continued in a similar vein for some minutes, and Glenn had no doubt that there wasn't a person in the street unconvinced by the performance. Jamie remonstrated with him for some time about specific errors concerning Battersea Catholic Church, until Glenn had doubts that, in some parallel universe, he hadn't married a female, more terrible Jamie, a hairy-kneed killer in skirts. Jamie, sweat on his brow, greatly moved by his own performance (he, for one, believed every word he was saying), dropped Glenn, and - turning an arc past a smattering of people glad to hurry past the spectacle of a small drunk assaulting a much bigger one, slowly advanced on the now-cowering club owner.  
  
"Listen," he said hoarsely. "My sister's had a really tough time. She's pregnant. With his baby. And they've got another one, a wee boy, who's in the hospital with leukaemia, or something fucking like that."  
  
Glenn actually gaped at this (feeling, for the first time in years, an unaccountable _need_ to enter a church and beg forgiveness), but Jamie continued, eyes calm. "Now. I know you're not an unreasonable man. I know you don't want to ruin my sister's life by telling people her husband was hear tonight, doing Charlie with some tart."  
  
"But he _wasn't_ here," came the manager's near-whimper.  
  
"Exactly," soothed Jamie, placing a cool and steady hand on the manager's back. Neither he, nor Glenn, could quite repress a visible cringe.   
"So I'm going to give you five thousand pounds now, and you're not going to fuck this up for me. Because if you do, it'll be Chernobyl every time you take a shit. Do you follow me?"  
  
The manager looked fearfully from Jamie to Glenn and decided it didn't _matter_ whether he'd seen Glenn or someone else. The brother-in-law story sounded true enough, because nobody could be that hysterical over an invention, and, again, what really mattered was that he _lived through the confrontation_ then got back inside, alive, to erase the security tapes, empty the safe, and flee to Rio. He nodded.  
  
Success flushed Jamie's face. "Now fetch your staff."   
  
A few more people, all of whom had come to the doors but no further, listening in, slunk into the spotlight. Jamie gripped Glenn's shoulder so hard the latter thought he'd lose blood.  
  
'If I _ever_ hear that _anyone_ 's saying my brother-in-law was here tonight," he said clearly, "I will come back here, and I will ram _his head_ so far up all of your arses that you'll be shitting through your fucking eyes. Does anyone have a problem with that?"  
  
A voice spoke up. Predictably, it was Scottish.  
  
"The other bloke had a black eye."  
  
Jamie glared menacingly at Glenn. "Which?"  
  
***  
  
Before finding the right club, Jamie had rung Malcolm. Malcolm picked up the voicemail whilst climbing Olly's stairs.  
  
"If you lay a fucking finger on her Good-Housekeeping, Sandi-Toksvig-fucking thigh, I'll put you in a fucking coma so deep you'll be trapped inside your imbecilic skull for all eternity. And if you ever wake up I'll send Julius Nicholson to visit you, every fucking day, in a pinstripe made by deaf limbless orphans in _Thailand_. And he'll have a fucking handkerchief in his top pocket and you'll want to put it on his head to block out the sun bouncing off his skull, but you won't be able to move your fucking eyes, and if you can, I'll tape them open. He'll sit there wearing the fucking orphans and telling you about the fucking _cricket_ until you learn to disconnect your fucking _oxygen_. Happy Digitnas, cunt."  
  
As Malcolm neared the threshhold of Olly's bathroom, he could hear sniffling. Nicola had arrived in something of a state and, intensely embarassed, Olly had offered her his bathroom and his female housemate's cosmetics - she was in Nicaragua, thank god - to right herself. Malcolm paused, sighed, adjusting his plan of attack. His Blackberry rang _again_. Jamie live now, and not the next best thing.  
  
"If you fuck her, I will remove your balls before the next 5-a-side, shove them up your arse, inflate them with a pump I'll have inserted for the performance, bring them back downyour fucking _navel_ and invite the Treasury B-Team to practice penalties up and down your sorry castrated carcass. I'll feed you to Wonky fucking Ron."  
  
"Did you find the club?"  
  
"Oh aye, that's all fucking sorted, we can't all sit around with our faces in Nicola Murray's muff."  
  
"Is Glenn listening to this?"  
  
"He's having a slash. Or I think he might be crying. I had to give him a black eye."  
  
"Christ."  
  
"Don't you christ me, you fucking cunt. And how _is_ she, by the way? Weeping salty tears at both ends?"  
  
"You're a fucking psycho, do you know that?"  
  
"Missing you already, you sad fuck in a bag."   
  
Jamie hung up first, by a whisper. Suddenly alone on the landing, Malcolm paused, listening to the distant sounds of beeps and spin below.   
  
Journalists had started calling, and everyone was responding: no truth in the rumour that Olly Reeder had taken cocaine with a stripper in Soho. Jamie had squared the club manager to ensure there was no truth in the rumour that Glenn Cullen had taken cocaine with a stripper in Soho. Terri, justifying her existence for the first time in weeks, had put out a complex web of lies and misdirection based on creative interpretation of a Mannion restaurant receipt that Malcolm had been _saving_. Her insinuations were the last word in evil, and Malcolm suspected she might be the most useful of all.   
  
Malcolm did think about calling Sam, a practice he deplored but which invariably brought good results. However, last time there'd been an overnight crisis (two months ago), his 2 a.m. SAMcall had been answered by A Fucking Man, a disturbing and distressing experience that had put Malcolm in a fury for weeks. Only Jamie had appreciated the full, disgusting detail of the situation, and had immediately to punch the guy in the head. They'd sacked their crisees in double-quick time, leaving Malcolm free to drive round to her flat and sit outsidewith a crowbar, but unfortunately at 7 he'd woken with a sore neck and no car battery, crowbar still in the glovebox and a suited Sam tapping bemusedly on the his window.   
  
Julius Nicholson rang up briefly to smarm through what was either insomnia or a late-night-post-Bullingdon drunkdial, but Hamish snatched the phone off Terri and (picking up a small dictaphone Malcolm had left), pressed a button and played the opening bars of George Michael's 'Careless Whisper' down the handset. Julius had immediately shouted, sworn hotly, and rang off, squawking like a girl. Now every call was taken with an eager hand above 'Play'.  
  
They'd already had a call from Fraser saying they'd found and frightened the glamour girl, who did indeed have a White Power tattoo as a trampstamp. Frankie's brother over at GCHQ had matched her dad with some dog-kicking footage as part of a English Defense League demo outside Morden mosque, and although nasty, the little cow was intelligent enough to back off for fear of offending the paper.   
  
With his minions confusing the press and his henchmen terrifying the culprits, Malcolm was reasonably confident that James Murray's activities in the last six hours would never make it into the papers.  
  
However, one swallow did not a blowjob make. What Malcolm needed to ensure was that this never happened _again_.   
  
He glanced at his watch. The tenth. The PM would announce his final reshuffle in four days' time, and then it'd be the election. If they stayed in power, Nicola could be in no. 10 by Christmas. He _could_ do this. He rested his Blackberry against the bridge of his nose, and sighed. Then he banged on the bathroom door.  
  
Nicola had been rather stumped to find herself searching the cosmetics bag of a woman twenty years her junior. After the first, violent fit of crying - mortification, and hurt, and exhausted frustration that everything she worked for should be _ruined_ by that _child_ of a man - had ended in about six minutes, settled for washing her face very thoroughly, and trying to do something about her hair. Her head hurt, but she otherwise felt better than she might have expected: calm, if rather like she'd escaped from drowning. She kept hearing her mother's voice, hosting her brother's engagement party the morning after their father left with Clare. There had been twenty-four people in the house party, and not one of them suspected anything was wrong.   
  
It was the first time Malcolm had seen her without makeup, with her thick hair loose and coiled about her neck. Her temples were damp, and her skin like sallow porcelain. She was finally dressed like an actual human being (albeit partly in pyjamas), barefoot and defiant in the filament light. Her hair was going slightly grey at the roots. Malcolm thought it suited her.   
  
She couldn't disguise the fact she'd been crying, or the fact she'd been asleep only forty minutes ago, but, propped against the bathtub, Malcolm saw her hold-all. Patent boots, smart coat, skirt and black top. Handbag and suit bag. Her makeup was the only thing she _had_ forgotten.  
  
Defiant, over-emotional and incredibly well-organised. Malcolm was pleased to finally see her mouth without her lips ruined by lipstick. Even at sixteen, Malcolm had hated kissing women slicked in magenta grease.  
  
Shutting and bolting the door, he sat opposite her, on the lowered toilet lid. Nicola was suddenly glad that, unlike Terri, Olly, and to some hideous extent Glenn, he wouldn't attempt the pleasantries.  
  
"Is he shagging her?"  
  
Nicola flinched slightly, and there was a suggestion of an eyeroll before she exhaled. "Not unless it's Viagra. And I believe that coke isn't."  
  
She found she couldn't look at Malcolm's while she said it, or while he replied. "The coke's a regular thing, then?"   
  
Perched on the edge of the bathtub, she was opposite a pile of white, fluffy towels. At that moment, her only impulse was to lean forward and slide into them, head against warm cotton, to sleep without James or government or the requirement to worry about either, ever again. Then she remembered that one of those towels was probably the towel Olly used to dry his cock, and rallied.  
  
"I don't know. He was at dinner with some guy from school - _fucking_ Monty, Malcolm, he's the worst of the fucking lot."  
  
"What, Fatty's brother? That cunt who runs -- Jesus Christ, Nicola, not the one who forged the Watford contract?"  
  
"No! No, the offshore division. The younger. He married the posh girl. Not the boring one, the tall one whose dress kept falling down. Oh, fuck, they're all as bad as each other." She slumped, ran both damp hands through her hair. "I think he does it when he's with them. I suppose you want me to resign."  
  
Those muttered words infuriated Malcolm more than almost anything that evening,5 and when he went to correct Nicola's misapprehension, it was with all guns blazing and crazy, crazy eyes.  
  
"I have got the _entire fucking Press Department_ down there, with the exception of two men who are driving _your_ worthless spouse round Soho, and Jamie fucking Macdonald, who has personally broken Glenn's browbone - "   
  
" - Jesus Christ, Malcolm - "  
  
"Oh, he fucking loved it, I'm sure he's into all that whips and chains stuff at home. Hugh probably made him wear a gimp mask, he - all right, fine, but it was fucking necessary to rescue _your_ political career. Are you listening to me?"  
  
Nicola conceded she was.   
  
"Now, if this were anybody else, anyone at all - Fatty, Geoff fucking Holnhurst, that git from Transport, Clare fucking Ballantyne - I would be dusting off my big black hat and personally hammering the nails into your coffin. If Julius Nicholson's husband - well, if Julius Nicholson had a husband, I'd laugh all the way to the dildo emporium, but if anybody connected with Julius's shiny bald skull was snorting gack with a racist btch, I'd long-lense him myself and then I'd stick that long-lens right up Julius's arse."  Malcolm leant forward, addressing her with urgency and passion even as he sat on Olly Reeder's toilet. "But I'm out there fighting _your_ fucking battles. I kept Tom in power and I kept the cunt before him in power, and I don't hate you anything _like_ as much as I hated them."   
  
Nicola managed a half-smile. Malcolm experienced a disturbing sensation somewhere behind his upper ribs.   
  
"Do you want to divorce him?"  
  
Through the thin and overpriced ceiling, they could hear Frankie bollocking someone on the phone. _Careless Whisper_ kept cutting in, like a television bleeper.  
  
Nicola found she already knew the answer. "No."  
  
It wasn't what he'd been hoping for. The expression of his eyes, however, did not change. "I've got a very good lawyer."  
  
His tone was so dry that now, she _did_ smile. "Really."  
  
He shrugged, but his lips had quirked. "Did for Jamie."  
  
"And for you?" She'd have given the world to call those words back. She was glad he didn't answer them.  
  
The Blackberry buzzed - with a half-apology by way of raised fingers, Malcolm answered, listened, swore and hung up. "All right, the boys have dropped Unity Mitford back home, and Jamie's bringing James back here."  
  
"No," said Nicola suddenly. "I won't see him."  
  
Malcolm raised his eyebrows. "Listen, Nicola, there's a bright new fucking day of bollocking out there, and frankly, if you want to be the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain not to make a Faustian pact with the devil, I suggest you man the fuck up."  
  
"All right," she said, with difficulty. "But not here."  
  
Malcolm considered this, considered Sam, gave Julius Nicholson the 'Busy' signal, and nodded. "You say your kids aren't at home?"  
  
"Toby's at a friends' house, Ella's on her D of E."  
  
"D of E, fucking christ, why did I _bother_ with Young Socialists. Fine." Malcolm pressed speeddial, hitting a number that looked suspiciously like '1'. He started speaking at once. "Don't bring him back to Olly's, drive him home. What? Don't be so fucking stupid, _theirs_. Don't go til I get there. What?" A pause, while Malcolm's lips grew exceptionally thin and Nicola was glad that someone other than herself actually had the _nerve_ to make him look like that. "Well, fuck you very much. No, she's not going to divorce him. Yeah, I'm sure it'd make her life a whole fucking lot easier if she did." His eyes had taken on that malarial, manic look again, and it took all Nicola's nerve not to shrink back towards the shower tap.   
  
"Well yes I _would_ fucking know, wouldn't I? Jesus wept, it's like talking to Jimmy fucking Boyle crossed with that bitch off - Sybil Fawlty, yeah, thank you, you finished my fucking thought, yeah, you're indispensable, where would I be without you, you fucking parasite?"  
  
Nicola wished she could crawl inside the toilet roll, if only to be _sure_ Malcolm would forget she was there. This was enthralling.   
  
"Well I don't know, shite-for-brains, perhaps she just, not unnaturally, relishes the prospect of a day spent without some pugilistic midget wanker throwing handfuls of shite at everything she tries to achieve."  
  
Nicola's eyes widened. Her husband was several inches taller than her. Malcolm, who had still not removed his overcoat, had an angry flush along his cheekbones that was either boozer's rash or primordial anger.   
  
"Yes, that _is_ what I'm fucking saying." A barked laugh. "You bet that's what I'm telling her. Aha. Hm." Another volley from whoever was on the other end (Nicola, her cheeks flushed and her awareness of, well, _everything_ suddenly heightened, now had her eyes fixed on the skirting board in mute testimony to the fact that she would _remember nothing_ of this conversation), and then, from Malcolm, a voice that made all the house - even Eachann, mid-Gaelic-bollocking in front of Olly's Macbook - temporarily silent. It began as a seethe and grew quickly to a shout. "Why does she stay with him? Well, you cunt, I imagine it's because she _FUCKING LOVES HIM_."  
  
There was a pause while Malcolm ended the call and stood there, breathing hard. Nicola justly waited until his respiration was inaudible. Then Malcolm straightened up. "Right. Get your HRT and let's go."  
  
\----  
  
A taxi returned Glenn to Olly's house about three minutes after Malcolm, Nicola, and the Calendonian crack squad had left. Olly was sponging coffee off his Wii Sport, distraught at the living room's devastation and severely pissed off that Frankie, at least, had found time to beat all his high scores. Glenn dropped his coat and, without a word, went to Olly's freezer. Terri, coming down the staircase (she was rather excited, it was years since she'd been in a "student house", although of course her husband had been doing his A Levels when she met him), gasped as he straightened, the frozen peas not yet against his eye.  
  
"My _God_ , Glenn!"  
  
"What's he -- oh, _brilliant_! Did Jamie do that? When you wouldn't put out?"  
  
Fuming, bruised and just _far too old_ to be standing up this late at night, Glenn glowered at his colleagues. "I," he said tightly, "have just saved Nicola Murray's political career. And, in consequence, both mine and fucking Boy Wonder's jobs. Julius fucking Nicholson's probably asleep in tailored pyjamas right now, and I'm standing here looking like a battered fucking wife!"  
  
"You _are_ a battered wife, Glenn. Except now you're _Jamie's_ battered wife."  
  
***  
  
The unmarked car had been circling the roundabout for five minutes. Driven by one of Caledonia's finest, it held as cargo James Murray and his captor, the latter in a state of indecision that necessitated the circling.  
  
Jamie was silently processing the conversation he'd just had with Malcolm (although subtlety was not Jamie's strong point, he'd definitely detected an analogy in Malcolm's last stream of vitriol), and the effort gave his eyes a strangely protuberant effect.   
  
Intruding on his stream of legitimately violent and retributive thoughts, and even crossing over his mental channel showing images of Malcolm and Nicola fucking like rabbits, were two images. Both disturbed him deeply. Jamie was accustomed to white noise and static filling the spare corners of his head (interspersed, of course, with Old Firm slogans and when he could next have a cigarette), but these memories (as opposed to phantasms of cuckoldry and murder) wereunaccountably sharp.  
  
The first was of him and Malcolm, last Boxing Day, after Claire'd screwed him over regarding access, and he'd been left to crawl round to Islington in a state of cataclysmic fucking depression  
  
They'd watched a fucking boring film that Malcolm liked, and about which he had a hundred fucking boring film books. Unusually, Malcolm hadn't bothered to cook , so during the film they'd eaten themselves senseless on the best takeaway that was open (Lebanese, where the family loved Malcolm and quite wanted him to marry their daughter).  
  
Malcolm hadn't questioned Jamie's right to be there; he'd opened some passable beer, unimpeachable wine and, amongst the festive debris, ensconced them on his ofa. By the end of the first film, Jamie'd insinuated his head more or less onto Malcolm's thigh and, pissed reckless, Malcolm was wearing a paper hat. By three, Jame'd passed out entirely, glutted and in a state of seasonal exhaustion: when he woke at five, Malcolm was asleep too, arm over Jamie's chest and his cheek at the back of Jamie's head.  
  
It was the first time in ages Jamie'd seen him in anything like an unmedicated sleep, and the sheer _fact_ of him, deadly and thin and wrapped round Jamie, with a crumpled paper hat on his face, made the room seem to tip and the world spin sideways. Drunk, Jamie lay awake and hung on, staring up at the ceiling and trapped by a feeling he couldn't identify.   
  
Just before he woke, Malcolm had pressed his face into Jamie's neck, and shivered, and from that moment everything in Jamie's life had been floating tits-up like a drowned Danish corpse.  
  
The other memory was Brighton, in the nineties; Jamie was effectively still a shelf-stacker, and Malcolm was junior enough to have personally hired him the week before. The conference was a chaos and they were both sleeping on the floor; a jaunt made all the more novel because both of them, at that time, were married men. They should have been fixing the section of mess appoportioned to them, but the catastrophe seemed like a holiday. Watching the sad fat cunts bluster back and forth, and confident that the thin, clever madman on his right would sort it all in a second --  he already thought Malcolm was a genius, or at least the brightest man he'd ever met - Jamie said something funny, and Malcolm started to laugh.   
  
Whatever it was - and Jamie would have given half a bollock to remember - it had been enough.  
  
The memories were ostensibly unconnected, and nearly a decade apart. Like any good Catholic, though, Jamie fucking loved a triptych. For completeness' sake, he therefore allowed himself to recall the fucking _sensational_ shag he and Malcolm'd had that night, prior to the sleep which James cunting Murray's marital misdemeanours had ended. Usually it was fucking Nicholson interrupting their _devoirs_ , ringing up with blue-wank-sky-wank cuntingdon, like some plan to hand over SureStart to Simon Cowell, or make shiny bald cocksuckers available on the NHS. And that was just at night -- Jamie'd had a fucking dodo's egg on his skull for _months_ after the stupid tit waltzed into Malcolm's office and Malcolm had had to shove him under the desk.   
  
Fucking Murray fucking dogcock. _And_ his wife. Jamie still _knew_ , unquestionably, that that cow wanted to have Malcolm's last-chance _babies_ , but then everybody fucking would, given half the chance. Jamie fucking hated them all.   
  
(He'd reached a decision about where they were going)  
  
Nor did Jamie fucking accept any of Malcolm's Jeremy Kyle Nutter rhetoric about why people fucking stayed with each other.  
  
In fact, he'd found it all pretty fucking unsubtle. After all, Malcolm had fucked up a marriage as soundly as he. Although with far more excuse.  
  
Jamie gritted his teeth. James Murray, unnerved by the sounds of grinding, was peering at him and pretending not to.  
  
Jamie banged on the driver's partition.   
  
***  
  
"Christ Almighty," beamed Olly, looking like a (really nasty) kid on some (satanic) Christmas Day. Glenn blinked, glowering at his colleagues and trying not to just cry from the pain. "Even _Hugh_ never made you go that far. Or did he? I guess those cockrings must have chafed."  
  
"Shut up," snapped Terri, going forward to peer at the purple edges visible around pictures of anthromorphic peas. "Oh, pet."  
  
"And for _Nicola_ , as well!" Olly was gloating, arms folded, willing to forget that - an hour before - Frankie had called him "Notting Hill" and told everyone the 'Strawberry Shortcake' story, the most embarassing of Olly's childhood, directly gleaned from Olly's stepbrother, with whom Frankie played squash. "I mean, I know being Hugh's human shield was essentially what your career's been based on, but -- "  
  
"OLLY. Button it." Terri glared up at him with the well-bred, slightly horsey expression of bio-nuclear _fury_ that reminded Olly, secretly, of his mum. He tried to look cool but his balls shrivelled a few inches. "Unless, of course, you'd like to explain why _I've_ just found Dan Miller's photograph on your bedside table?"  
  
\---  
  
The Murray household, when Nicola and Malcolm reached it, was not silent. Malcolm was mildly disappointed to have missed the start: Jamie's bollockings were the only bollockings worth watching, any more.  
  
Nicola dropped her handbag on the hall floor (predictably, the house was the usual upper-middle-class configuration of stripped pine and over-expensive cornices - they weren't quite posh enough for staircarpet). Malcolm, attuned to the sounds of Jamie's voice for reasons he could not explain, absent-mindedly found himself removing Nicola's coat for her, and hanging it on a convenient peg. The sun was beginning to stain London's sky a noxious yellow, and Malcolm was dying for two paracetamol and bed. He couldn't escape a wary recce, though; excluding his sister's, this was the first normal house he'd been in since, well, Sam's (the morning after the Black-and-White Ball. She'd insisted he come in and have a cup of tea; Malcolm had been paranoid and edgy, wishing he could get Forensics in to identify the nature of the fucking degenerate who'd had his filthy way with His Assistant).   
  
There was a bland black-and-white portrait on the wall; the kind of casual montrosity where the whole family's smiling and inexplicably barefoot. Nicola at least had the grace to look thoroughly embarassed. Ella was as sulky as Malcolm remembered.  
  
Slightly ahead of Nicola, he glanced into the Murrays' front room.   
  
James Murray was seated on a kitchen chair, with Jamie circling him in a configuration more associated with victim and kidnapper than consultant and pressman, particularly in the former's front room. From the expression on Murphy's well-bred, good-looks-melted, liquid-rugger-bugger-lunch-blue-eyed-booze _face_ , Jamie had been going at him for some time.

  
He had evidently also been making a tour of the Murrays' home (at least on the ground floor), because in his right hand he held a kitchen skewer, and in his left a poker taken from the Murrays' large, ornamental fireplace. With these, via the judicious use of mime and gesture, Jamie enforced his message. It took Nicola and Malcolm several (silent) minutes to ascertain that James was not, in fact, bound to the chair. Nor was the poker-tip glowing.

Malcolm would never be sure at what point Jamie noticed they'd entered the room. James had more sense than to look over, or perhaps rigor, through terror, denied him the use of his neck. His captor eventually paused the harangue to ask a question.

"What were you even fucking _doing_ there? Those places are for _kids_ , or at least people not so old and bloated they can't see their fucking _dicks_ any more."

James didn't give his answer at a sufficiently loud volume. Jamie brandished the poker.

"Old Wykehamists' dinner."

"Wykehamist. What the fuck sort of word is that?  D'you spel it W Y  cunting dickhead, by any chance?"

Murray's face looked sullen. "I can show you the invite, it's an alumni - "  Jamie snatched a piece of paper from James's top pocket, ignoring the moment when the skewer jabbed at James's left cheek.

Even Nicola realised that showing Jamie public school paraphernalia was not the way to escape the situation intact.

"What is this? A list of all the men you've ever _fucked_? And is that your _fucking school tie_? School colours? Fucking magnificent. What are they, red for being a scumbag, blue for being a gacked-up nonce and brown for the enormous pile of shit you're in? Because you have made a lot of shit tonight, mate. A lot of shit. But you'll eat that shit, titwank, and it's going to disappear inside you, and we're never going to see it again"

"Oh, for fuck's --"

"Oi! Do I come to your work and knock the dicks out of your mouth? No! So shut the fuck up and listen. As I was fucking saying, Two Girls One Fucking Cup will have nothing on you, you great greasy cunt."

"Look, I really don't think -- "

"No. No you fucking _don't_. And usually, you snivelling, obese, fatsucking cunt, the fact that you walk around without your brain doesn't fucking matter. Because let me make this very clear, _you are not important_. You're like the piss up the back of a kebab van. Flies wouldn't touch you." James made some motion, either of objection or escape, and Jamie wedged the poker up under his chin.

"I told you to listen. You are _worthless_ here. But your wife," he explained, voice changing to a new lightness that might or might not have been a prelude to ramming the poker up James's chin and out the back of his head, "she's _very_ important. I'd go so far as to say she's fucking _essential_ , and if you ever show the slightest sign of fucking disrespecting her again, I'll staple your fucking cock to my very large filing cabinet, and then I'll slam the drawers all the way from A to fucking Z."

He got his face square-on to James's, and his eyes were full of passionate fury.  "Let me tell you, you pathetic, mimsy little shit, this is not how you treat anyone you're supposed to fucking care about. You might have missed the fucking boat on that one, probably Daddy beat Mummy and Nanny was too busy wanking off the gardener, but this isn't fucking _Ralph and Ted_ , you're not in _Lady Chatterley's_ fucking _Lover_ , when you're fortunate enough to be united in the bands of holy fucking matrimony with the person you adamantly do _not_ deserve, and who incidentally is essentially running _this fucking country_ \-- "

Jamie hadn't taken a breath. Apparently he was never going to again. Malcolm found he felt the same way.

" -- you man the fuck up and you fucking well respect the fact that they're a million miles better than anything you could hope for. Your wife fucking loves you."

He straightened up, wiping the sweat from his face and giving Murray - by now both terrified and maudlin, a sneer of disgust. "For Christ's sake, you look like your face is lactating. Stop _snivelling_. Jesus wept." James rubbed a hand over his face, muttering. Jamie surveyed the room as if searching for an overlooked prop. The furnishings forced him to be content.

"Now, me and my fucking heroic band of colleagues have squared all this as well as we can - which, I might add, is pretty fucking _historically_ well, but just in case the police do come crawling up your slimy, scabrous arse, your wife is going to give you an alibi that you were in your own marital fucking bed." 

Nicola suddenly felt a bit sick. She was grateful Malcolm wasn't looking at her; in fact, for the past couple of minutes, he seemed to have been turned to stone. In the living room, Jamie kept on brandishing and seething.

"Which is very nice of her, because, frankly, the thought of you touching her makes me want to vomit up my fucking _spleen_ , and I can't imagine the prospect's a better one for anyone who has to wake up and see _your_ biscuit-coloured tumour-face pawing her every morning." James recoiled, looking (unbelievably) like he might be going to argue that one - Nicola found herself half-hoping he would, just to see Jamie smack him. It wasn't that she hated James - in fact, everything Jamie'd said about her feelings had been true, although she didn't consider being _married_ to him especially fortunate. It's just that she wanted to see him with a broken nose.

Jamie was evidently of her opinion. "Now, to be honest, I'd like your wife to dredge the fucking canal with you, all the way to the divorce courts, but that won't help your kids or her career, so we're just going to make this little incident disappear. Again, I'd gladly complete that fucking process with a concrete overcoat and a spade in your fucking head, but I understand Toby's got his entrance exam for St Cocksucker's, and black's never really been Nicola's colour. So get with the fucking programme, or I'll staple your cock to your face. Your wife is going to be the next fucking Prime Minister of Great Britain, and no paunchy fucking _Nazi_ is going to piss on her parade."

Malcolm switched on the light.

James Murray, on realising that both his wife and Malcolm had witnessed his humiliation, immediately wished for death. He tried to open his mouth, but no sounds formed. Nicola, warding off tiredness and all possible attempts at conversation, crossed to the sideboard.

"You can get up, James," she said drily, "he isn't actually going to stab you."

Jamie gave him a look that said James shouldn't bet on that. From a drawer, Nicola produced a pretty tin box, the kind the upper classes kept as retro chic, and which had originally held syrup of figs. Jamie's gran had had something similar to keep her savings in. Inside was an envelope, and inside that, a bag of white powder. James made a desperate sound of loss as it was shown. Avoiding his eyes, and with a dignity even Jamie had to respect, Nicola handed it to Malcolm.

'Is this all of it?"

"Nicola, I --"

His wife kept her eyes fixed on Malcolm. "I've told you everything."

"All right, Mr and Mrs fucking _Macbeth_ ," Jamie muttered, disturbed by the new understanding that passed from Nicola to Malcolm's gaze. He didn't like it at all. James was blubbing.

"I didn't think you _knew_ ,"

"Of course I knew."

"Of course she knew!"

"Of course she knew!" Jamie chimed in, involuntarily loyal. "She's very fucking clever."

Malcolm gave him a look that was very nearly stunned. Then he leant in close to Murray, and his voice was exceptionally soft. "Listen, pal. Go through rehab or find God or whatever it is you fuckups need to do. But don't pull a stunt like this again, or I'll put you through a divorce so brutal that - Jamie? "  Jamie handed him the poker, at once, " - the sensation of this poker entering your anus will seem like an erotic fucking dream. Jamie."  Jamie took back the poker. Malcolm was not as tall as Murray, or as physically imposing. However, with the sun breaking outside in the street and illuminating his wraithlike, cold-eyed face, he looked like one very nasty fucking nightmare indeed.

He put a hand on Murray's chest. "We'll take your money. We'll destroy your job. And we'll take your kids." Nicola tried to speak at that, but a look from Jamie told her not to intervene. Malcolm was peering up into her husband's face, colder than dawn, trying to work out how anyone could be so incredibly imbecilic and live. "You won't see them regularly. You'll get court orders and every time you do, I'll fuck them up. You'll never see their birthdays, you'll get maybe half an hour here or there, ice-cream sundaes or some atrocity by _Pixar,_ and by the time they're old enough to have a fucking conversation, I'll make sure they hate you even more than I do." The front of James's shirt had torn, inside Malcolm's preternaturally bony fist. "Do you know what that would fucking _feel like_?"

It was so very dreadful when it became apparent Malcolm was waiting for an answer. James tried to think of a good one without shitting himself.

"No," he tried, at last. Jamie and Nicola hid their faces. Hastily, he corrected himself. "Yes," he replied, a little more steadily.

"Good," said Malcolm. He let go of the shirt, eyes as dead as they'd ever been. "I think you bloody ought to, by now."

He put the cocaine in his pocket and headed into the hall. There was a pause, and then an irritated Glaswegian voice snapped, "Jamie."

And Jamie Macdonald followed him.

\---

1 Everybody noticed. Everyone. Olly's next-door neighbours and the insensible pot plant in his front room.

2 "Mistakenly", because it hadn't happened. _Any_ of it. None of it had happened. Et cetera.  2.5 Malcolm would of course have spent the night in fucking _Slough_ for politics, or at least the aspect of politics keeping him in Armani. But he did have an unhealthy aversion to sleeping out of London.

3 And a fucking gorgeous husband, about whom Jamie had suspicions and Malcolm incontrovertible proof. However, that was a die-another-day sort of row and not to be had now.

4 Glenn had been hoping for Robyn. Poor old Glenn.

5 Despite some pretty stiff fucking competition, including Jamie, Olly, and a drunken email from Julius Nicholson that was blank except for a joke about Wagner.  



	3. Put Your Shoes By The Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Cut out his tongue. Chop off his hands. Deny him access to one of those little light-up, eye-controlled Stephen Hawkings board things[...]"

"Where do you want him to drop you?"  
  
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Malcolm."  
  
Malcolm shrugged. He sat back in the seat and closed his eyes, rubbing the cool shell of his Blackberry against his nose in a way that would either ease his headache or give him cancer. When Sam's geeky little brother (12 A*s and an Unconditional for PPP) emailed to say that putting your phone on your head automatically upped your signal, Malcolm was the only one who'd tried it.It'd worked.  
  
Jamie let him rest, glaring at his pallid face and acting for him when they passed the first open newsstand of the morning. Given a twenty and told to keep the change, the driver pulled up, stepped out and bought them everything.   
  
Malcolm really did look like shit, Jamie decided, piling the papers onto the floor. Malcolm opened his eyes, but they were bloodshot and Jamie had a fucking confusing urge (one of the several from that night) to tell him to fucking give up coffee, or see his GP, or actually properly _take Sunday off_. He settled for shoving Malcolm's knee out the way, leaning heavily against him and (scanning to check nobody'd reported the Basingstoke thing and Tom hadn't looked too fucking stupid next to the guy from Suwait, before) opening up the football results.   
  
The car rolled on towards Islington, the air-pollution glowing with the promise of a long, hot day. You could almost hear birds above the traffic. Replaying the past few hours in his head with dismal certainty, Malcolm reached a certain temporal sticking point, time and again. He was wondering if Jamie'd noticed the fact that his stupid fucking outburst on the phone had more or less said how he, Malcolm, felt about him. If so, it'd be fucking inconvenient. Politics might make strange bedfellows, but when a mass of aortic, choler-choked fatty tissue behind your lungs started playing havoc, it was time for a nice piece of steel and a few dozen stents.   
  
Jamie read a vicious article on Ronaldo, and started laughing.  
  
Malcolm fucking wished it was Tuesday. Tuesday was work and football and a decent curry. This Sunday was feeling like a fucking tumour, carrying the world on his back and waiting to see if either Jamie or the media was going to try and psychotically fuck up his life.   
  
He and Nicola had drunk coffee all the way from Reeder's to hers, and Malcolm was at the stage of radioactive horror where his body was decomposing but his mind said it would live forever. And now Jamie was in his personal space, the great lumpen prat, needing a bath and dropping his great heavy limbs all over him while incessantly rustling the Sports page. Malcolm did not fucking appreciate it. It was not fucking restful.  
  
He woke with a start when the car reached his drive. If Jamie cared, he didn't show it.  
  
\---  
  
"What the fuck are you doing?"  
  
"I just want to watch Breakfast. Check."  Malcolm was standing alone in the middle of the room, a complete lack of support (despite the available armchairs and sofas) his only guarantee of remaining awake. He looked like something dead in the corner of a graveyard. Jamie, his hair making him look mad and homeless (he was wearing Malcolm's spare dressing gown, which Malcolm really hated), gave him a look of disbelief.  
  
'We fucking sorted it, Malc. Get the fuck -- "   An image of Nicola Murray flashed onto the morning news screen, and Malcolm's face turned suddenly grey.   
  
Jamie didn't remember doing it, but he must have crossed the room, wrapping an arm round Malcolm and withstanding the pain of the hand that suddenly gripped his.   
  
It took them both a second to process, the alarm bells of crisis ringing so loud it was difficult to hear what the newsreader was saying, but when Clare Ballantyne's picture followed, then Jo Langley's, then Colin Walpole-Whitterley's, Mark Shoresmith's, Alan Harding's, and finally, Julius _fucking_ Nicholson's, the resulting graphic showed the six heads of those whom the newsreader (nice chap, not that he'd look it when Malcolm'd _disembowelled_ him) identified as the contestants in a forthcoming leadership battle. By the bright red border round her headshot, Nicola was the frontrunner. By now, Malcolm had slackened his hold on Jamie merely to crushing, and they were leaning on each other like two Glasgow drunks.   
  
After everything, to see Nicola merely confirmed as a possible successor just seemed tremendously funny. Malcolm rarely laughed - Jamie could count on one hand the times he'd seen it - but he made a low noise that might have been triumph, or relief.   
  
Jamie tried to kiss him. Malcolm stopped it before it started.  
  
"You need a shower. I'll be up."   
  
\----  
  
Malcolm kept watching the news until he heard the shower switch off, swilling whiskey round his glass. Automatically, he poured a second dram for Jamie. At any other time he'd have called himself a soft cunt, and mentally pre-empted Jamie's derision by asking himself if he'd rather wear a frilly apron and a fucking Stepford Wives smock, but now he was too tired.  
  
This was new. Not the fucking, or even crawling sexlessly into bed when they were both too shattered or pissed to stand, but sitting downstairs while Jamie used his bathroom. Hearing Jamie move round his house and get into his, Malcolm's double bed, was a departure and a fucking unwelcome one, at that. The only narrative that had ever mattered to them was politics, which was ironic given the lack of protocol now. Malcolm felt the sense of grasping, uselessly, at air, and hated it.  
  
Getting up the stairs, his feet felt too heavy to lift, and once in the bedroom (thankfully fucking empty, although fuck knew what Jamie was doing in the bathroom), he stopped, too tired to undress or pull back the clothes. He got like this sometimes, in the aftermath; he'd have been happier just prowling about, flipping chaneels until lunchtime, when he could justifiably drink and pass out on the floor.  
  
Jamie wandered in with a towel round his shoulders and in Malcolm's dressing gown _again_ , and Malcolm wanted to spit like a trapped cat. Half of him hated Jamie, for looking so awake and young and cogent; the other half wanted to sink into soft bedding and make a Faustian pact with oblivion while pillowed on Jamie's chest.   
  
Unfazed by Malcolm's observation, Jamie wandered about, drinking the whiskey (evidently accepted as his due, without comment) and whistling off-key Jolson. Jamie was one of the worst singers Malcolm had ever met.  
  
Still in his pocket, the Blackberry rang.  
  
It was Nicola, being grateful. She too had caught the news. Malcolm was just forcing his shattered hearing and exhausted brainstem to focus, tuning in to the breathless gratitude of a woman who'd been up all night, when Jamie peeled off the dressing-gown, turned, and met Malcolm's gaze.  
  
In the back of Malcolm's eyes, a cigarette light flickered into flame.  
  
Perhaps there was a point to this, after all.  
  
"Not tonight, eh, Josephine," he murmured, and hung up on a spluttering next-Home-Secretary. Across the bedroom, Jamie grinned. Malcolm let him enjoy the moment, staying still as Jamie crossed the bed, undid Malcolm's tie, and - going on about something Malcolm didn't have the energy to follow - started work on his collar, cufflinks (Malcolm did interrupt _that_ , to make sure they found their box) and shirt. When the buttons reached his navel, Malcolm closed his eyes. He would rather have showered first, but there you go.  
  
After that, everything was a lot fucking easier than Jamie'd expected. He used the pause while Malcolm's cheek was against the crook of his neck to reiterate, in a low murmur, all the things he would do if Malcolm ever fucking _looked_ at Nicola Murray again. He unfortunately got distracted halfway through, because Malcolm's fingers were sliding lower and lower on his bare back, towards the cleft of his arse, and some of his later threats didn't sound much like _deterrents_. He felt Malcolm smirk, and then bite his neck, and then things got fairly competitive because although he never minded the reverse, Jamie regarded biting Malcolm as one of his God-given, unassailable rights.   
  
Thing was, he had other rights, too. More that involved ownership, certainly, but with less marked skin. Jamie fucking loved marking skin. It was one of the things they'd initially agreed on, actually - when they'd started, Malcolm had had the infinitely filthier brain, and it had taken his ex-novitiate friend some time to get used to those elements of their deviant considered most deviant. Malcolm just had time to look wary and ask _Jamie_ , _what the fuck are you doing_ (Malcolm never said his name in bed, five thousand trillionty points to Jamie, who had been keeping score since '99), before a series of events that Malcolm, at least, hesitated to remember afterwards.  
  
With the exception of his ex-wife, and people who were in prison, Jamie had known Malcolm longer (and, without exception, better) than anyone alive. Previously, the only implications for this, sexually, were how much better it was and that Jamie didn't expect him to talk afterwards.  
  
They had one moment of feint and duel (Malcolm languidly doubting he'd keep his eyes open; Jamie instantly, gloriously angry), and then Jamie's mouth was on his neck and Jamie's hand on his cock, and when Malcolm next had a coherent thought, it was three hours later, and he felt as weak as a fucking newborn.   
  
Jamie was wrapped around him like a hairier octopus. Malcolm vaguely remembered coming so hard he'd passed out ten seconds later.   
  
He subsequently (as the fog cleared) remembered Jamie lying behind him, one arm pinning his chest, and saying things to which a man in Malcolm's position (political, not geographical) should not have responded so _vociferously_. He remembered being fucked very _very_ slowly, but only when he'd been brought to state of clawing at Jamie's skin to get it.   
  
Every second he remembered made him want to cut out Jamie's tongue, remove his hands and deny him access to one of those eye-motion-activated boards. The Stephen Hawking things. Takes three hours to dictate "M a l c o l m   T u c k e r   l i k e s    i t    w h e n   y o u"  but Malcolm felt sure the media would be prepared to be patient. Fuck, they'd fucking _dismember_ him, if they knew.   
  
He was five seconds from smothering Jamie or heading for the shower, when the cause of his problems awoke.   
  
He needed to piss, of course, because his bloodstream was black with caffeine, but when he returned to the bed, he rolled through the wet patch (Malcolm was sort of fascinated by that, actually, despite simultaneous disgust), wrapped one leg over Malcolm's hip and kissed him, messily (another departure, and not one of Malcolm's choosing). He couldn't know that Malcolm was lying awake trying to determine how to murder him, but he did recognise his bloodless lips and chilled gaze for what they were.   
  
He rang an inquiring hand over Malcolm's hair, caressing, and Malcolm remembered to his _horror_ a pivotal moment from the night before when Jamie had done the _exact same thing_. And he'd liked it. God, it wasn't as if he didn't fuck Jamie on at least one weekday and twice at weekends; it was not _natural_ to suddenly want to drag himself all over him and get everything at once. Everything was accelerating.  
  
"Malc? What the fuck?" Jamie's preternaturally huge and frequently terrifying eyes searched Malcolm's face for signs of paralysis or trauma. "Jesus Christ, you look like you just found a fucking tumour." A light switched on. "That stupid cow hasn't rung again, has she?"  
  
"What?"  
  
And then Malcolm remembered. Before the sex. More important. Longer. Hours. Glenn Cullen's black eye. Nick Griffin. Racist cunt's daughter. Olly Reeder's carpet, Nicola's face just washed, that _insane_ moment on the phone when he'd compared them to the Murrays' in a misguidedly vengeful method of telling Jamie, once-and-for-all, that he was suffering some inane mid-life crisis with himself as the victim.  
  
And Jamie himself, playing de Sade with James Murray, lauding a woman he resented, becoming torturer and interrogation king, because that was what Malcolm wanted him to be.  
  
Malcolm reflected, not for the first time, that the sheer mad-headed _loyalty_ of Jamie (barring that fucking awful FCO episode, fuck you fucking cuntbags) was like the cancerous mutation of whatever Blitz spirit had got Britain through the wars.   
  
It was oddly touching. He felt almost moved, gazing up at Jamie's terrorist hair and homeless-loon face. Besides, with the return of consciousness came the recollection that Jamie knew he'd done coke, framed his half-brother, and fabricated the dossier that helped take Britain to war - in fact, Jamie had helped with that one. What could he say? Sometimes, people were just good together.  
  
If Jamie followed Malcolm's interior monologue on his face (if, indeed, Jamie had the capacity for that), he didn't respond to it.   
  
Well, not immediately.  
  
"Incidentally, don't ever insult me by using those dozy cunts' marriage as a metaphor for us."  
  
"Jesus Christ, don't use the word 'us' like that." Malcolm complained, genuinely disconcerted and not repressing a shudder.  
  
"You were using any words I fucking _wanted_ , last night." Jamie reached across him (Malcolm, without comment, supported the weight on his chest), grabbed a long-delayed post-coital cigarette and disobeyed the cardinal rule of no smoking in Malcolm's house.  
  
"Oh, aye, funny I don't remember, would that be the Rohypnol?"  
  
"Fuck you. And don't fucking use, my divorce is not a fucking Hallowe'en story for James Murray."  
  
"How do you know I wasn't talking about mine?"  
  
"As if you can fucking remember, that year's just whiskey and the Budget to you."   
  
This stung for a few seconds, but then again, anything Malcolm could remember beyond liverish horror was either dispatch boxes or Jamie holding his head.   
  
"And besides, you don't have kids.'  
  
A short pause, while Malcolm reflected - not for the first time - that the marriage had probably been his fault as much as the divorce. He winced, but didn't say anything. A longer pause, while Jamie dragged deeply on the cigarette again, and then, in a voice that was nineteen fucking years old, pure Glasgow, pure job interview marvel start of the rest of Malcolm's messed-up life, spoke.  
  
"I've got them next weekend."  
  
A treasured phrase. Used up so many times that Jamie now never employed it without certainty. It'd been months.  
  
He wanted to reach for Jamie, but the arm already under his head had gone dead and was losing temperature (was probably mottled, by now), while the other one (now dumbly accepting the cigarette) would spray ash on the duvet. Temporarily prevented, and temporarily thrown, Malcolm said the first thing that came into his head.  
  
"You're a good father."  
  
Sorry, actually, that'd been what he'd meant to say. It had been a definite conclusion, minutely formed, safe and irreproachable (well, actually, Jamie'd probably have called him a cunt) but the moment his lips started to move, what he actually said was, "I love you."  
  
Three words. Carefully unsaid, to or by anyone, since his wedding day. Apart from one ham-fisted, drunken declaration in an alleyway, after the DoSaC Christmas party, which Malcolm had nearly killed Jamie for, and which they'd never mentioned again. Since then, Jamie had occasionally said "I fucking love you," down the phone to Eachann or Frankie or his fancy coffee git, but the coffee-seller had impetigo and Jamie'd once threatened to shit in Frankie's neck.   
  
Momentarily, the look Jamie gave him was worth it. He felt he'd never before made Jamie smile. Unfortunately, Jamie was still Jamie, and joy became viciousness, with an edge of scatalogical lunacy.  
  
"Apparently I should fucking torture the rich more often. Was it the poker that did it, or when I threatened to shit on his tie?"  
  
"You never threatened to shit on his tie. _Jamie_ - "  
  
"I know." Gleeful tone gone, Jamie reached across and rubbed the lines between Malcolm's eyebrows. Batting him away with an irritable hand, the inevitable sparks burned the duvet - Malcolm swore, Jamie reached over and dropped the fag-end into a glass.   
  
There was a slight smell of burning feathers, rising up from the bed. Outside in the road, the traffic had started whirring and for the first time that morning, Malcolm was aware of life beyond the room. Which was, of course, easier than being aware of Jamie. Who, to add insult to injury, leant over and kissed Malcolm's forehead like he was a child, or a pet.  
  
An _euthanised_ pet.   
  
After a pause that might, in a kinder world, have allowed Malcolm to begin leaving the country, Jamie decided to add injury to insult He rolled back on top of Malcolm, resting on his elbows and watching him very gently.   
  
"Listen, Malc -- "  
  
Malcolm could spot sympathy accelerating towards him and made efforts to escape. "Oh fuck off, Jamie, you don't have to say - "  
  
"I'll say what I fucking well please. _Listen_. Come and have lunch with me and the kids, on Sunday."  
  
It was a remark so monstrously unexpected, so casual, that Malcolm found himself first dumbfounded and then angry. Shoving Jamie off, grabbing for his dressing gown, he was out of the bed and away to the bathroom door before (deja vu) Jamie, naked and appalled and calling him nine kinds of muff diver, could catch up.   
  
Another angry shower. The added interest of humiliation. Another angry Scotsman barging his way in.   
  
"Kindly tell me what the fuck is wrong with lunch with me and my beautiful daughters, whose air, incidentally, _you_ are not fit to breathe, you fucking ungrateful dick?"  
  
"Fuck off. I said just fuck off, JESUS Christ, what is WRONG - "  
  
Jamie pushed himself under the faucet, blocking Malcolm's escape and apparently indifferent to the fact he'd just switched the sensor to 'Cold'. "I will have," he promised, "your balls for fucking _apple peel_ , when I have _cored them_ , inch by inch, using your fucking three-blade Gillette, unless you stop being such a belligerent shite." He was deaf to Malcolm's answering torrent.  "So just keep fucking still and tell me why you've got that face on your face."  
  
"Get out of my fucking shower or -- fine, fucking stand there, but I'm turning this off." Malcolm reached over and wrenched the dial. They stood there, dripping cold water, Malcolm's extremities mostly blueish, Jamie red with bloodflow and rage. There was a loud gurgling from the plughole.  
  
Jamie breathed deeply. "I invited you to lunch."  
  
"As you have before, very fucking _kind_."  
  
"You've never been quite such a rude bastard about it before."  
  
"Well, I've never offered you my fucking spleen on a fucking plate before, excuse me if I don't want to break bread in a fucking ballpond - "  
  
Malcolm's back hit the tiled wall with surprising force. With no lapels at his disposal, Jamie was reduced to balling his fists on Malcolm's bare skin.   
  
"Leave them out of this, or I'll -- what's the fucking matter?"  
  
"I told you I fucking loved you!"   
  
If there was ever a time Malcolm _didn't_ want to see Jamie's expression of amused fucking condescension, it was then.   
  
"Right. Smashing. Were you expecting a blowjob? Was I meant to beg after _as well as before_ the fucking event?"  
  
"Jesus Christ, did you get through that bag of Murray's while I was asleep? I said I fucking _loved you_."  
  
"Aye, and same to you, for the last three thousand fucking years. You cunt, do you think you're such a political fucking genius that I'd follow you about if I wasn't completely fucking obsessed with you? How stupid _are_ you? You're not _that_ fucking brilliant."  
  
"Excuse me, pal, I fucking well _am_ ," raged Malcolm, venom in his spittle and still ignoring the facts that a) he was naked, b) he was freezing, c) he was standing in an empty shower overly close to a man whose skull he wanted to rattle, and d) Jamie was apparently in love with him. Such was the magnificent roar of his fury that his brain had completely overlooked the last part.

"Oh yeah, and how good would you be without _me_ to bury your fucking bodies?"  
  
"Well, we know how fucking good _you_ are alone, you burnt down the Foreign Office!"  
  
"You got sacked! You wore a fucking _fleece_ \-- "  
  
"I came back! I'm going to win the next General Election."

" _We're_ going to win the next General Election, unless I fucking beat you to death first."  
  
The two men glared at each other for a moment. Something stirred, dimly, in the recesses of Malcolm's brain. "Do you actually -- "  
  
"Oh, fucking finally. Yeah. Jesus Christ, is this early-fucking-onset or did you have a stroke in the night? Right after I gave you the best fuck you've ever -- "  
  
" -- shut it," Malcolm shouted, going horribly red. In the resulting fray, he almost forgot to say anything at all. As it was, his only remark of value was, "You didn't - ?"  
  
"I always have, dick _."_ He shoved him again, for emphasis. "For fuck's sake, there's nothing outside of you."  
  
Malcolm stared. Jamie gave him one, last push, and the noise on his skin was a stinging slap. "What do you want me to say? That the sun rises and fucking sets with your malevolent, frigid, cold-blooded, anal-fucking-retentive _cunt_ of a Nutter-sympathising dog-raping _face_? Because if you fucking do, then --  "   
  
Merely to prevent the sentence ever being finished, Malcolm kissed him.  
  
  
Epilogue: The Same, Later That Day.  
  
  
  
Malcolm's phone rings in the early afternoon. His first, groggy, unnecessary thought is _Jamie_ \- which is ridiculous, because Jamie is there, breathing against his heart, beginning a low, groaning tone of complaint at the interruption, while Malcolm stretches across and (eyes still shut), answers.  
  
For once, nothing is in crisis. Julius Nicholson has not been discovered wanking hysterically while wearing a dress and smearing his penis with lipstick. Glenn Cullen has not removed his clothes and declared himself to Robyn. Jamie has not beaten Olly to death (because Jamie's right there), nor have Eachann, Johnny, Frankie, or Phil Smith. Hugh Abbot has not returned to DoSaC with a sawn-off shotgun. Nobody's aborted anything, nobody's reported anything, nobody's teenage child has been on Facebook, and the Murrays are enjoying a delicious family lunch. Instead, it's the lovely Dan Miller.  
  
Malcolm raises a smirk and manages a sleepy purr. "Mr Hollywood. Daniel. How lovely to hear your beautiful fucking voice."  
  
Beside him, Jamie growls, and slithers under the duvet again. In the satisfied lineaments of desire, uncertain whether he'll get it up again but certain Jamie'll try dying, Malcolm stretches back in the pillows and flirts. As Jamie's mouth descends, Malcolm smirks and arches his back. Admittedly, he does get distracted.   
  
Somewhere along the line, Dan Miller either hangs up or dies, but Malcolm pretends to continue the conversation, enjoying - as best he can - Jamie's fury in the face of such apparent composure. It's familiar, fucking fantastic territory, and Jamie's revenge - when he realises - will be exquisite.  
  
Malcolm finds he's looking forward to it.


End file.
